As Caring Place Healthcare Group faced a skilled nursing industry that was growing more and more technical and specific, they didn’t need just another software solution, nor did they need a consultant that would merely stay on the sidelines.

They needed a partner.

They found one in the industry-leading combination of Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting.

“We were looking for a partner that was going to collaborate with us while protecting the integrity of our organization,” says Santanna Rapp (RN, BSN-LNHA) Chief Nursing Officer at the Cincinnati-based Caring Place Healthcare Group. “We’re family owned and locally operated, and we needed a partner that wouldn’t just tell us the technical pieces but would guide us, brainstorm with us and work beside us. That’s what we were looking for.”

Specifically, Caring Place wanted a partner that would assist them with their quality measures and Five Star performance, Section GG accuracy, clinical reimbursement and other operational initiatives. Rapp and the team at Caring Place have a motto: “Be fanatical about quality and relentless about improvement.”

“That’s exactly what we have achieved with this partnership,” Rapp says.

What Caring Place found in Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting

Caring Place’s navigation of the increasingly technical skilled care landscape brought them to Engage Consulting, which partners with post-acute leaders to solve complex clinical and regulatory challenges.

The conversation quickly evolved to include sister company Concept Rehab for therapy services.

“It made perfect sense to blend in Concept Rehab and bring nursing, rehab and therapy together,” Rapp says. “It was a no-brainer: your biggest systems all working together collaboratively with nursing is essential for success.”

For Caring Place, their partnership with Engage Consulting started with prioritizing four areas:

• Their MDS processes 

• Ohio’s quality incentive program (QIP) performance 

• Interdisciplinary Section GG coding 

• Training of the Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) manual 

What Rapp recognized was that success in any of these areas depended on success in all of them, and that was only possible if everyone at a given Caring Place SNF understood the ins and outs of these programs, not just those at the c-suite level.

“This work is all technical-based, and frontline workers don’t always receive training on that technical base,” Rapp says. “You might have your administrators and your directors of nursing and your MDS nurses knowing that language, but that’s what it is: a language all to itself. How do you take that and apply it so that your team members can all understand?”

In short, Caring Place needed “intentional education.” While Engage Consulting brought specific tools and training, Concept Rehab provided interdisciplinary education, a proprietary platform that provided tracking systems for Quality Measures and discharge measure score performance.

The cohesion was immediately evident.

“Caring Place is really progressive with the way they set goals for their operation, so it wasn’t about ‘fixing what’s broken’ but about reaching a level of excellence with rehospitalization, with quality measures, with star rating,” says Kim Saylor, Chief Growth Officer for Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting. “In this partnership, we set a goal to advance every community a five-star rating, so it was really about trying to get everyone to excellence rather than being hyper focused on one particular problem.”

3 key lessons from Caring Place’s work with Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting

The team at Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting meets with Caring Place’s MDS nurses every week, with larger organizational meetings twice a month. This creates a relationship that is “high accountability and high touch,” Rapp says. And it helps Caring Place align corporate goals with clinical goals.

The collaboration has brought Caring Place a 15% quality incentive add-on — an average daily increase of over $40. But as Rapp and Saylor stress, their collective focus is in viewing all data holistically.

“You can’t improve on quality if you don’t have transparency and data-sharing, and an approach of asking, ‘What went wrong, and what didn’t?’” Rapp says. This approach has led to three key lessons that all SNFs can follow.

1. Real-time data only creates value when teams use it to make better decisions

While Concept Rehab did bring technology into the partnership with Caring Place, that technology did not improve quality on its own. The Engage 5-Star App gave Rapp and her team visibility into emerging trends, but the results came from acting on that information through: 

• Weekly interdisciplinary reviews 

• Cross-departmental education, tools and training 

• Operational accountability, goal-setting and transparent tracking tools 

As a result, data became part of everyday decision-making instead of a quarterly report.

“With their technology, we were able to identify and track in real time when a resident had a change in condition,” Rapp says. “By combining resident-level data with clinical expertise, we gained critical visibility into Five-Star performance, Medicaid rates and quality incentive payments.”

2. Quality improvement is an interdisciplinary effort

The strongest gains occurred when nursing, MDS, rehabilitation and leadership worked from the same playbook and shared the same goals. As the partnership evolved, therapy was intentionally aligned with Section GG performance, functional outcomes and quality measures and rehospitalization reduction initiatives, creating a more coordinated approach to resident care and reimbursement.  

Through their commitment to quality and continuous improvement, The Caring Place communities earned Bronze and Silver award recognition.

3. Sustainable performance comes from building systems, not chasing scores

In the first eighteen months, Caring Place’s work with Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting drove a five-star quality rating for all five communities. Before the partnership, Caring Place was seeing 30-40% rehospitalization. Now they’re below the national average. The 15% quality incentive add-on is another great result. 

But all of these datapoints and others are outcomes, not strategies. Consistent processes, standardized workflows, ongoing education and continuous monitoring reduced variability across all five facilities and helped create lasting improvements in quality, reimbursement and operational stability.

The knowledge transfer from Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting to Caring Place, the training, the focus on education and upskilling? “Our goal was to create a deep knowledge base and skillset across the entire organization,” Saylor says. “For this to be sustainable, we needed to create internal experts along with scalable systems and processes. The leadership and staff at The Caring Place were invested and dedicated to their goals.”

Rapp agrees.

“The industry changes very quickly, and it’s getting very competitive out there in the market when it comes to strengthening your stance to have stronger hospital partnerships,” she says. “So this makes us a stronger hospital partner, because they know we have the ability to handle a higher acuity. And that’s because we have a true partnership with Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting.”

This Views article is sponsored by Concept Rehab and Engage Consulting. To learn more, visit them at www.conceptrehab.com and www.engageconsultingpartners.com.